It turns out that the mill George Washington built is still in operation–and that it was cutting-edge technology in its time.

Turns out you can buy cornmeal from that mill. Add in shipping and it wasn’t the most cost-effective way to go, but then I haven’t bought cornmeal in years so I figured two pounds was the right size to last me for awhile. Besides. It was just so cool.

I do like making cornbread that is all or almost all cornmeal, no or almost no flour: it’s tasty but very crumbly, and I tend to throw in an extra egg to hold it together and extra butter, but I haven’t had teenagers to feed in awhile so it’s kind of fallen by the wayside.

My order came today. Somehow the bubble wrap felt like a severe anachronism. Really? I mean, really? (The shipping peanuts were the potato-starch type, which was great.)

But then I cut through to what was underneath those bubbles and, yes, they were right–they absolutely needed to keep that thing from bursting out all over, because a historic-style tie made out of a strip of muslin is only going to get you so far; it needed to be held as still as possible as it bumped through the mail.

I should be typing this to you with a review of how the cornbread came out, but the bag was just too pretty to wreck its very first day here so there’s sourdough rising in the kitchen instead.

Another Milk Pail pick-up day, and the blueberries got turned into the compote for these custard cups. Almost no guilt and quite good.

Meantime, my cousin Heidi stumbled across this article about a real-life Lord of the Flies situation in 1966, except that that book was written by a violent alcoholic.

Six young boys from Tonga got shipwrecked together for fifteen months onto what was literally a deserted isle: it had previously been populated–till a slave dealer had kidnapped everybody, leaving behind the crops and the chickens whose descendants later helped sustain the kids till the day a boat captain just felt like going a bit out of the usual route that day.

The kids had prayed together; they had given themselves timeouts when they found themselves starting to fight rather than letting it continue. They behaved the way their mothers had clearly taught them.

They totally rocked that intense shelter-in-place.

The roasted radishes were definitely the way to go. Sweet, soft, no heat–and pretty.

This peach tree nearly died of leaf curl disease last year, but look at it now.

Milk Pail is back! Sort of.

Their old store is being bulldozed by the developer but it turns out they had a warehouse that they’d held onto, and they still had 45 years’ worth of connections to all kinds of suppliers.

In this ongoing shutdown, a lot of farmers are hurting badly and a lot of grocers are having a hard time stocking their shelves.

The newly retired Steve missed his customers. His daughter, back in college with the burden of stocking the shelves gone, was up for part-timing it now.

You could create a lot of market for individual small farmers if you were packing take-what-you-get bags of produce and olive oil, etc etc for several thousand customers via a drive-through.

And so, in a riff on the Community Supported Agriculture movement, they have started Brigadooning it on weekends. Order on Tuesday, pick up during your chosen hour on Saturday or Sunday, put your name and order number in Sharpie on a piece of paper and hold it up to the window with the back window rolled down or the trunk popped and they’ll just swing your order right in there with a smile, a no-touch contact but definitely a human one.

Last week for their first run it was mostly an assortment of marvelous cheeses with a few accompaniments.

Some of it went in the freezer, because there are only the two of us.

But the response was so enthusiastic that it was definite proof of concept, so now you can order bags of produce, too.

Man, it felt strange to get behind the wheel of the car, and did you ever notice how intense the leaves of all those trees that aren’t in my yard are? And almost no traffic.

Up one side of the parking lot, stop, roll the window and share a moment of oh it is SO good to see you all that went both ways, and back around the divider to the other side of the lot and away.

My first take on the radishes was, what on earth could an ileostomy patient possibly do with those?

There had to be something. Which is how I found this page. Roast them like potatoes and it comes out like that? Now I can’t wait to try.

Keenly aware that every vegetable in my fridge is one someone else didn’t get to find on the shelves, I made a big pot of soup and cleared out what was left of the older as I fit in the new, and it came out really good. Vegetables are food and flavor, not aspirations and intentions. We are definitely eating better.

Has anybody else been cooking a lot more since this shutdown started?

That sourdough starter needed to be used, right? (Hey look, a personal XKCD cartoon!)

The pumpkin in that last loaf didn’t strongly flavor it but it did help keep it moist from Thursday to Monday–not bad for a no-fat bread. The birthday boy requested cinnamon bread; I used a stronger cinnamon (Penzey’s, not Costco this time) and doubled the amount but kept the pumpkin for the moment, since I need to use that up. It definitely passed inspection. This could get to be a habit.

The seahorse looks much better with eyes now.

The former President of Stanford University died of COVID-19 today.

Suddenly my patience with staying home went right back up again to where it needed to be.

I’m going to go knit another row.

(Photos: clafoutis before baking and after.)

Someone actually found eggs at the store yesterday.

I thawed a quart measure of mixed berries, and then realized, wait, wrong recipe: the clafoutis only called for two cups.

Two condensed cups, how about, as they kind of slumped coming out of the microwave, but I dutifully (and somewhat generously) measured into the Mel and Kris ceramic pan.

You know, I know you don’t put butter in clafoutis, but it would sure improve it if you did, so I melted two tablespoons of Costco’s finest and into the batter.

Then what, I wondered, standing there a moment looking at it, do I do with the juices and berries still sitting in that big measuring cup?

Someone is having a birthday shortly, and someone couldn’t find whipping cream yesterday and someone bought canned spray cream. Two of them. Because it’s going to be his cake and those are fun and we could use some fun.

I thought, what the heck, cracked an egg in and pssssssst with the cream on top. Whisked it. Nuked it.

Now that. That is the level of fat you want with those berries (even if you think you shouldn’t really.)

The clafoutis was the best ever, but the impromptu side dish was better.

It was so good. Definitely making that pumpkin cranberry sourdough again.

Also in the future food department: looking at my apricot, tomato, butternut, zucchini and watermelon seedlings, I was trying to figure out how to grow all those where there’s the most sun.

The edge of the concrete patio, for one.

My sister Marian has talked a lot about her gardening in cloth grow bags, which got me to go look. The county just shut down the nurseries and those are sold out on so many sites.

Someone on some review said the Vivosuns were the best they’d found, with a three year warranty to back them up.

Another brand was reported as ripping immediately out from the weight of the dirt coming in. I do not understand manufacturing something to be immediately thrown away in the landfill.

The latest of Vivosuns with the improved (maybe read: their decorative contrast color?) handles were sold out but the older version still beat the competition from everything I could find.

The price, the usefulness, the durability, the washableness, you could chase the sun around the yard (maybe, doubt I will) with those handles making them more portable: I bought the 5-pack of 15 gallon size on the idea that those would be big enough for both my tomato plants and, eventually, those teeny tiny apricot seedlings. Of which I have three and two, respectively.

And now that size is sold out. I just barely made it.

Gardening supplies: they’re the new toilet paper.

Bread post #2: I used the sourdough starter and then I fed the little beast more flour and water like you’re supposed to and having looked over the two sourdough cookbooks Becca had recommended, I saw the pictures of the pumpkin cranberry bread, found that yes I had dried cranberries and canned pumpkin and the four mandarin oranges to squeeze the juice out of, and it was, Sold! Game on! (Yeah I like physical cookbooks better but instant gratification has its moments.)

Emilie Raffe’s Artisan Sourdough Made Simple does a good job of explaining what to do, how to do it, why you do it, and when you do it. Plus everything sounds really good.

I shot a question at Becca: am I right in thinking that there’s no butter, no fat, in sourdough breads period? She answered that other than some focaccias, pretty much as far as she knew, no.

Lesson learned number one: time it so that the 6-8 hour rising is overnight. You don’t want to be finishing up at midnight.

Lesson learned number two: probably I need to figure out how to cut the parchment paper so it goes nicely around the edges of the dutch oven it’s going to bake in without scrunching the stuff up like tin foil and am I going to have to cut it out of my bread when it gets done?

I’ll find out. It’s too late now.

Lesson number three: when she gives you the ingredients by weight or cup measure and recommends you go by weight and the 500g comes out to closer to four and a half cups not five, and you stick to the 500g, add in the juice, and think this is way too liquid, this can’t be right–it is. At the end of the process, including shaping the loaf on a bit of flour and the cranberries plumping out by baking time, it came out just how you’d want.

Both Becca and the book say absolutely do not cut into that loaf till it’s had an hour to cool, well, other than that little slice(s) you do across the top before it goes into the oven so that it can have room to expand.

Not devouring it immediately after anticipating it the entire day is going to be really hard. Those spices and flavors on my hands from kneading it–I was like, I have to wait how many more hours?

Lesson number four: it’s supposed to be best the day that it’s baked so maybe having it cool near bedtime wasn’t the brightest idea? See Lesson #1.

But homemade pumpkin cranberry orange sourdough bread with spices.

Yeah no, wasn’t going to wait till tomorrow for that.

(I have no doubt that if you want it faster and easier you could make its equivalent with yeast and regular dough and you could even mix some butter in. Boil or soak overnight but do something first though to make the cranberries soak up those spices and juice like mine did over the course of the day.)

p.s. Ten minutes to go in there, and it’s smelling divine and almost but not quite done.

I baked these yesterday.

They were supposed to be for the freezer for bites for breakfast: chocolate, eggs, hazelnuts, sounds pretty healthy, right?

Only, the freezer is still waiting and I walked in the kitchen this afternoon to–wait. Wow.

So now there are two.

(Turns out I needed two pans for one chocolate hazelnut torte recipe and I only had the one, so the other half of the batter became an 8″ cake which is as yet untouched. Because it looks too big and caloric to break into. I know, I know…) 

Last summer I bought some apricots at Andy’s Orchard that did not taste like any apricot I had ever had in my life. Not only were they sweet, there was a richness and a depth and spiciness and indescribable something and wow were they good. And this from someone who had once thought apricots were kind of meh–but having read a little about what Andy had now, and having tasted his Blenheims, I had to give the new varieties a try.

Someone he worked with had spent decades going into some of the more dangerous parts of the world where they’d originated, trying to discover what that particular fruit was meant to be. He collected the pits and brought the best home to see what might grow in the very different climate of near-coastal California.

He sold a few trees to Andy, but they are not for sale to the general population.

And yet, the pits from the ones I marveled over were going to be at last halfway from one of those trees and the other parent was at the very least going to be something Andy grew and you know that that meant it would be something you’d be glad to have.

And so I looked up how to sprout apricot kernels.

There was a consensus that they had to be kept chilled in the fridge for months. From there the advice diverged wildly: one writer was adamant that they must be sprouted in the fridge as well, another that you needed a heating pad. One said wrap them in wet paper towels after the winter chilling (I couldn’t see how the rot sure to come would help anything), another said soak them overnight.

I soaked them overnight and wondered if I’d drowned them all and would have to wait a whole ‘nother year to try.

I tried a few days of having small pots of soil in the fridge with two of them and then thought, okay, that just really doesn’t work for my household, you know one of us is going to knock dirt all over in there, nuts to that.

The house is a bit chilly and I think our old heating pad got tossed about twenty years ago.

I’ve been watering them for a month. My tomatoes have their third set of leaves but those apricots did not come up. I had planted them after my fevers ended and my cough was subsiding to give me something to look forward to and how long was this supposed to take, anyway?

I resisted the temptation to dig one out just to look at it.

Three days ago a root appeared down the side. Next the split edges of the kernel pushed just slightly above the soil line.

Where they still are. But thicker, and turning green under the skylight and you can just see that it’s getting its strength together so as to be able to hold up a whole baby tree once it pushes itself the rest of the way out of there.

There’s a second pot that looks slightly different, like it might show soon too.

But this one was marked as the one that had been the biggest seed and now it’s the most vigorous earlybird and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

I’m gonna need me some bigger pots. I do have one new one waiting. But the lockdown.

At some point I’m going to be trying to find someone to adopt my spare apricot seedlings, like trying to give away a litter of kittens–just, bigger, right?

That’s the hope, anyway.

1. It had been two weeks since she’d sprung us and she was hatching another plan for helping us be sure we still had depth perception. We were not to be exposed: she would do everything. She had us look at the menu and decide ahead of time.

Restaurants are allowed to serve to-go only, curbside.

She drove us to this ice cream shop. I had never seen parking freely available around there before. Ever. Everything around it was closed, as well it should be, and even the restaurants had the lights really low, trying to cut costs with the hit to their income or what I don’t know, but this one had their door open wide on a chilly day like the Whos in Whoville calling out to the larger world, We are here, we are HERE!

Dandelion Chocolate Hazelnut totally for the win.

We’d actually tried calling Timothy Adams, thinking to get some hot chocolate to take home, too, and to see our old friends there (at the prescribed six foot distance and from the car) and it hurt hard that there was no answer.

One dessert place can stay open and the other can’t? What’s up with that?

2. Why that cashmere cowl got ditched for so long, as it turned out: I’d started it, I’d changed the pattern, and I hadn’t known where to go with it from there. When I rediscovered it I continued the second part and figured it would tell me how to end it: whether to expand it outward so it would be in three sizes to match the three stages, or whether I even had enough yarn for that.

It did tell me. I didn’t. I got to where I was unsure I could do another repeat as is, even weighing it repeatedly and doing the math. I just wasn’t sure and I’m not one to do a game of yarn chicken over an hour’s worth of work that isn’t a necessary risk.

So I followed Eleanor Roosevelt’s dictum: if you make a mistake in your knitting, do it again and make a pattern out of it. The four-stitch-repeat top now matches the four-stitch-repeat bottom as if I’d meant to frame the picture like that all along.

I’d thought that small yarn small needle project would cling to me forever but it is finished and drying and somehow it is actually done and part of me can’t quite comprehend that. But I don’t mind that it is.

3. Seemed as good a reason to celebrate as any. Michelle had brought us blueberries.

I finished the hat. I found a red cowl I’d forgotten starting and got some work done on that, too, in Lisa Souza’s hand-dyed cashmere. How anybody could forget that I don’t know. It’s a very nice yarn.

This evening, the sudden quiet was almost startling when we turned the melanger off. Time to cool and pour the finished chocolate into the new molds.

Yonder geek husband had a new toy to try out. We have one of those laser thermometer readers, and he had the latest and greatest version with a flickering graph giving you sixty-four points of data instead of the one little red dot.

It was revelatory.

It read at five degrees celsius cooler than the old thermometer. Wow.

Which explains why the chocolate was almost setting in the bowl while the old thermometer was saying it was too hot to pour yet. It was clear to me it wasn’t. It wasn’t. And since adding any pre-tempered cocoa butter to make all the chocolate crystals align right is highly dependent on getting that temperature just so, well, we’ll see in the morning when we start unmolding the bars to see what we’ve got.

But so far, it looks like the best tempered batch we’ve ever made. New toy for the win!

Supply note: Esmeraldas cocoa nibs from The Chocolate Alchemist. Who has a photo of a chocolate Easter bunny with a white chocolate face mask on, the link to the artist who made it for him, and says the guy might make more that way if we ask him (he was hoping out loud for people to help the guy’s small business in the current environment.)

I have a favorite doctor. I’m tempted.

The six-county San Francisco Bay area is, as of this afternoon, essentially on lockdown: we can go to the doctor, the pharmacy, the grocery store, we can hire a plumber if need be and the plumber can come, but otherwise we are to stay home. Period. Till April 7.

There is a race on to hire delivery people and shelf stockers, with one company offering health benefits and sick leave even if the jobs turn out to be only as long as the pandemic, I’m sure those being a necessary component in the face of the incurred risks they’re asking people to take on.

I ordered a bar and some two-ingredient peanut butter cups from Dandelion Chocolates just to do my small part to help keep one of my favorite places afloat (the pastries in their shop! And it’s right around the corner from Imagiknit!) And because I’m curious: how good is something with no sugar and no salt, just peanuts and fresh 100% chocolate? I have a diabetic brother and I want to know, but if anyone could pull it off, they could.

And then, having perused their list of chocolate bars for longer than maybe was good for me and as a sign of our definitely doing better–we hadn’t done this since before Christmas and we were way overdue. I asked and he grinned and two pounds of Esmeraldas cacao nibs got roasted, Cuisinarted, and thrown in the melanger. An hour later I added .6 lb extrafine sugar; I figure we’ll come out about 78%-ish.

It’s just at the beginning so it’s slightly gritty, but I dipped a spoon in about an hour into it and man. That was good.

Dandelion sells Esmeraldas at two different sweetness options. Just saying.

And only then did I ask Richard if we were going to need to unplug the machine and run for the bathroom counter tomorrow while he has his conference calls with work. Plug it back in quick and shut the door? Because that thing is noisy.

That, he decided, was a problem he was going to be okay with having. We would see when we got there. But hey–homemade chocolate!

And all because Dandelion wrote this book that got us started.

A question: if you read the Narnia books as a kid, what did you think Turkish Delight would be like?

I thought of it as the obnoxiously tough toffee they sell to the tourists near Maryland’s shore, where sure it’s just sugar but you chew and chew and chew and chew and chew while it’s fighting back as if, should it win, it would wire your jaws shut out of sheer obnoxiousness, without enough flavor to make up for the assault on your mouth. If you still have all your teeth when it’s over you win.

My friend Michelle pointed out this Atlas Obscura article with the title, “CS Lewis’s Greatest Fiction Was Convincing American Kids That They Would Like Turkish Delight.” It made me laugh because it was so true.

Thus my curiosity.

I didn’t sample the real thing till well into adulthood, or at least not with that name attached, but you know what? In a way, I actually wasn’t all that far off.

Knitting? Not up to it. Reading? I’ve finished Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” and I’m halfway through a Jimmy Carter memoir that I was always going to get around to. Wow has the world changed over his 95 years. He’s not forging steel hoops to put around his dad’s wagon wheels anymore.

Edited to add, both noted their surprise at being handed a large bill at the end of the first month in: the President is responsible for the food bill of his family and guests at the White House. Any idle mention of a favorite or wished-for food ends in that food happening on their table no matter the cost if they don’t say anything different.

They learned fast.